I have an old family recipe for a Passover Sponge Cake. It uses 10 eggs, separated, the juice of 1 orange and 1 lemon, 1/2 C. Matzoh Meal Cake Flour, 1/4 C. Potato Starch. When I lived in Chicago, the cake rose 2" - 3" above the side of the 10" tube pan. I now live in South Florida, where we are at about 15' above sea level. I tried lowering the baking temp. from 350 deg. to 325 deg. and baked it 1 hr. 20 min. instead of baking it for 1 hr. at the 350 deg. Instead of it "poufing" like a souffle, it collapsed. What do I need to do to correct this - raise the temp, lower the temp, bake less time at a higher temp.? Obviously, I need help! Thanks!

I have an old family recipe for a Passover Sponge Cake. It uses 10 eggs, separated, the juice of 1 orange and 1 lemon, 1/2 C. Matzoh Meal Cake Flour, 1/4 C. Potato Starch. When I lived in Chicago, the cake rose 2" - 3" above the side of the 10" tube pan. I now live in South Florida, where we are at about 15' above sea level. I tried lowering the baking temp. from 350 deg. to 325 deg. and baked it 1 hr. 20 min. instead of baking it for 1 hr. at the 350 deg. Instead of it "poufing" like a souffle, it collapsed. What do I need to do to correct this - raise the temp, lower the temp, bake less time at a higher temp.? Obviously, I need help! Thanks!

Given a mean elevation of Chicago at 580 feet, I don't think the difference between that and your elevation in FL at 15 feet is playing a role. Chicago does not have a need for high altitude recipes. I would think other "environmental" concerns are at work. ??Do people in high floors of rise appartments need different cooking requirements from those below, probably not?? Things I would consider are:

Did the cake collapse before or after you removed it from the oven or did it not fully rise in the first place?

Are your ovens calibrated with a thermometer? Neither oven may be at the actual temperature you thought they were.

Chicago at Passover time probably does not need air conditioning, while in Florida you do. Are you cooling the cake or taking it out of the oven and placing it where it might be in a draft? Try cooling the cake slowly, maybe placing it in a large box so it doesn't get chilled by A/C air flow.

I don't think humidity would make much of a difference--any holiday kitchen I've been in has always been humid with everything cooking.

>>>>>My best bet would be cooling problems or non-calibrated ovens. Possibly baking at too low a temperature causes the cake to set before it has risen, resulting in a not fully risen, rather than a collapsed cake. >>>> A higher baking temp would force the air bubbles in the whites which are all you have to make the cake rise, to expand faster BEFORE the cakes sets and starts to set. When you remove it from the oven, cool it gently.

Finally since you moved, are you using the same equipment/technique to fold in your egg whites-make sure you fold in gently. Happy Passover.

maniacmom5---I asked my mother, the Passover baking expert in the family about your problem, and she also felt you need a higher oven temperature. Your present oven seems to cook at a lower temperature than your old one given the same 350 degree setting.

Old Passover recipes may need to be adjusted because the eggs we use today are bigger than eggs generally were a couple of generations ago. The proptions of in your recipe make me think that applies here. Most recipes I've seen have a total of at least a cup of cake meal and potato starch per 8 modern large eggs while your recipe has 3/4 cup to 10 eggs. Since the recipe worked in Chicago, this probably isn't the main cause but it may make the recipe more fragile.

Have you been using large or extra large eggs? Properly beaten (until stiff but not dry) 10 large eggs doesn't produce a cake that rises 2 to 3 inches above the walls of my tube pans. The rise you are reporting makes me think that a) you are using extra large eggs or b) you have an unusually short tube pan (but I thought they were relatively uniform) or c) you are overbeating the egg whites. Over beating the egg whites can make the cake taller if you are lucky but the texture of the resulting cake isn't as good and the cake is also more likely to fall. I know this because I started out over beating the eggs many years ago and found that the result was better and more reliable when I backed off to beating until just barely stiff (or even a little bit of a soft peak).

I agree with Gary that altitude isn't likely to be the problem. I'm close to sea level and 350 works fine for my sponge cakes - also the altitude difference between Chicago and Florida isn't significant for cooking. I've made sponge cake for a lot of Passovers and have never noticed any sensitivity to humidity or weather so that seems unlikely.

Sponge cakes don't really rise - all the air is put in at mixing time - they expand a bit due to heating of the entrapped air and then the cooked batter sets up and retains most of that expansion. There are three places that process can go wrong - preparing the egg whites and batter, baking, and cooling. If the batter seemed as normal going into the pan, that probably wasn't the problem. I can normally tell if the batter is okay from the way it behaves and feels. From your description it sounds like the problem occurred in the oven.

Time is the enemy of sponge cake batter. If the batter sits too long before heat stiffens it up, too much air may escape and the cake will go flat. So the cake coming out of the oven too flat means that it probably didn't cook quickly enough - a hotter oven is the direction to go. If the oven was too hot, the problem would be an overcooked outside of the cake while the inside isn't cooked yet, such a cake might fall after it was taken out of the oven as the uncooked inside collapses but it wouldn't come out of the oven flat. Possibly the low ratio of starchy ingredients to egg in your recipe makes it take a bit more cooking to set up.

A difference between your new and old oven heat seems the most likely cause. We recently remodeled and one thing I learned on forums is that ovens vary a lot in preheat time. So in addition to what Gary suggested, maybe your Florida oven takes longer to preheat than your Chicago one and it wasn't solidly at temperature when you put the cake in. You might get a digital remote read thermometer (easier to check oven temperature with out disturbing it). One brand is Polder. The oven should be at temperature for 15 minutes before you put the cake in so that the sides of the oven are well heated - that allows it to recover more quickly from the heat lost when you open the door to put the cake in.

One other obscure possibility occurs to me - shaking is suppose to make sponge cakes fall. I've never had a problem with that - but I wonder if it is possible that something in your new oven vibrates the pan.

To avoid falling after baking, the cake should be cooled with the tube pan inverted. Also make sure the cake is fully cooked before you take it out. The usual test is to press lightly on the top of the cake - it should spring back when done.

Gary, I agree that egg size hasn't changed for many decades and that modern US recipes normally mean large eggs when they say "eggs". But an old family recipe may be much more than decades old.

I have read that in the past (say more than 100 years rather than decades ago) the eggs in use were generally smaller than large eggs. The eggs great-great-grandma used in the shtetl were probably not equivalent to large eggs and the recipe was probably written in terms of the size of eggs generally available to her.

Even the eggs my grandma used in the US were more likely medium - my oldest cookbook is the New Settlement Cook Book copyright 1950. That cookbook has recipes written for medium eggs. In most cases, that medium eggs are close enough to large that the recipes are fine without adjusting the number of eggs. However, one sponge cake recipe from that book calls for 12 eggs and I have to reduce the number or the cake turns out too large for the pan.

In any case, the proportions in maniacmom's family sponge cake recipe are unusual if the eggs are large. I've made a lot of sponge cakes over the years and have never seen one that used that high a ratio of egg to starchy ingredients (cake meal and potato starch).